


A Last, Tenuous Connection

by regenderate



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, F/F, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 11:45:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18940261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: The Doctor manages to forge a tiny connection between his universe and Rose Tyler's-- just big enough to send a text through. So he does, and he keeps on sending them.The story of the Doctor's correspondence with Rose after saying goodbye.





	A Last, Tenuous Connection

**Author's Note:**

> this is my ONE HUNDREDTH FIC posted to ao3!!! yee haw!
> 
> (tw for mentions of pregnancy near the end)

Rose is gone.

Forever, this time.

With a new version of the Doctor.

Which leaves this Doctor, the original, all alone in the universe again. Donna is gone, Martha is gone, and Jack, and Mickey. No one sticks around long.

So the Doctor has time on his hands, and no one to share it with.

He spends years, in between adventures, looking for a last, tenuous connection to the other universe. Finally, he finds a crack, a tiny, tiny crack, between the universes, and he threads his phone signal through it, fiddling with the timelines so that it comes out just after he left.

 _Doctor: Rose, you there?_  
_Doctor: It’s me._  
_Doctor: I can’t come through, but I can text._  
_Doctor: You okay?_

He doesn't hear back for almost ten minutes. He almost manages to convince himself it didn't work when his phone dings with a response.

 _Rose: yeah I’m here_  
_Rose: sort of mad at you, really_  
_Rose: glad to hear from you, all the same._  
_Rose: how long’s it been?_  
_Doctor: Years._  
_Doctor: Couldn’t find a gap._  
_Doctor: You?_  
_Rose: about a day._  
_Rose: we’re almost home to my flat._  
_Rose: other you’s whining about having to go domestic, by the way_  
_Doctor: Not surprised._  
_Rose: now he’s asking who I’m texting. you’re the expert, is he going to get jealous if I tell him?_

The Doctor almost laughs out loud at that.

 _Doctor: You’re probably all right._  
_Doctor: I’m going to put this on a time delay. A day for you is going to be much longer for me. Helps to spread out our conversations. Might be a bit glitchy._  
_Rose: seems fair, if you’re going to live so much longer than me_  
_Rose: I still expect regular updates, mind_

The Doctor smiled to himself, even as silent tears tracked down his face.

_Doctor: ‘Course._

He points his sonic screwdriver at the TARDIS. He can feel the moment when the timelines pass out of synch, when he is officially moving much, much faster.

He slips his phone in his pocket.

The next day, he gets a response.

* * *

 He regenerates not long after that. His new hair is floppy, his new legs skinny, his new taste buds all wrong, but his phone is still in his pocket.

 _Rose: been back under a day & your evil twin’s already trying to ruin my telly with his weird experiments!_  
_Rose: too used to tinkering with the TARDIS all night long_  
_Doctor: Not so much a twin anymore…_  
_< image: IMG_9483211>_

He doesn't get a response for another two days, after he's met Amelia Pond, age seven, and then Amy Pond, age nineteen, and then Amy Pond, age twenty-one.

_Rose: wow that’s new_

“Who’s that?” Amy asks, on the other side of the console, still wearing her nightgown.

“Old friend,” the Doctor says, waving her away. “We text, sometimes. I can do that, you know.”

“The Doctor texts,” Amy says. “How odd.”

_Doctor: Tell my evil twin I say hi._

* * *

 This new body gets the same feeling as always when Rose texts— a shock of excitement, a hint of sadness, all centered somewhere in the stomach. The difference is in the reaction— this body reacts to everything in quick impossible-to-hide jerks and bounces, twitchy smiles and turns of head. Amy and, later, Rory ask about it sometimes, but one day for Rose is one year for the Doctor, and so he doesn’t get texts from her all that often, and he tries to time it so that he’s only really talking to her when Amy and Rory have gone off to bed.

Rose really isn’t a big part of the Doctor’s life, anymore. She has her own life. Her own Doctor, who she calls John, or sometimes “your evil twin,” and shares a flat with, and works a human job with, and who’s the last thing she sees when she goes to bed and the first thing she sees when she wakes up.

But this Doctor, the lonely Doctor, still loves hearing from her, no matter how many new friends he makes.

* * *

 He gets married. Rose is happy for him. He’s happy, too. He’s never been monogamous, after all. But he wishes Rose could have been there for the ceremony (never mind that she’d surely have died years ago if she’d kept traveling with him, or that the ceremony happened in a weird apocalypse universe and technically never happened).

* * *

He lives in this body for twelve hundred years.

In Rose’s timeline, it’s less than three.

* * *

He regenerates again, into an older, crosser body. He doesn’t tell Rose for a year— he justifies it by reminding himself it’s only a day, in her timeline. He doesn’t do “selfies” anymore. He barely wants to text, but there is a thin thread of care still running through him, and that thin thread of care is telling him not to let Rose think he’s forgotten about her.

She sends him pictures from her wedding. He has to admit it’s gorgeous, fairy lights strung around a backyard, her elaborately braided hair hidden beneath a sheer veil. John is in the pictures, too, looking more or less the same as always, wearing the sort of nondescript tuxedo the Doctor would never even have tried on, his bangs gelled and combed across his forehead. It made him look older, or maybe just more mature, more settled. Rose’s mum is there, and her dad, and a kid in a suit the Doctor can only assume is Rose’s new little brother. They look like a family. The Doctor feels a sharp pang of emotion. He tells himself it isn’t jealousy.

“You seem even grumpier than usual,” Clara tells him later, tilting her head to the side in the curious way she does.

“I’ve never been grumpy,” he says. “Only thoughtful.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” Clara says.

The Doctor checks his phone.

 _Rose: turns out married life isn’t nearly as boring as i’d thought_  
_Doctor: Good for you._  
_Doctor: Time travel is exactly as interesting as it always has been._  
_Rose: good for you, then :-)_

* * *

Clara knows he gets texts, but she doesn’t know who from— he rather likes the mystery. Rose, like all emotional matters, is personal.

* * *

Two hundred years pass.

Less than a year for Rose.

And then he regenerates.

* * *

Her phone falls out of her pocket on her way out of the TARDIS. She goes through a whole adventure before she realizes that empty pockets means no mobile, and for a gut-wrenching week she’s sure she’s lost Rose forever.

* * *

And then she gets the TARDIS back, and winds up trying to navigate the deep South with new friends that she’s already managed to put in danger, and then somewhere in between the seventeenth and the eighteenth stop (she thinks the TARDIS is trying to tell her something) something clatters into the biscuit tray. She hurries over and finds a shiny new mobile, embossed on the back with the word “rose” in thin gold Gallifreyan.

“Brilliant,” the Doctor breathes, turning it on. The lock screen is one of Rose’s wedding pictures, a close-up on her face, her brilliant smile shining up at the Doctor.

“What’s that?” Ryan asks.

“Nothing,” the Doctor says, already swiping to unlock the phone. No new texts, but—

“Anyone want to be in my selfie?” she asks, opening the camera app. It turns out she likes selfies again.

The gang gathers around her and she snaps a few pictures.

“Brilliant,” she says again, sending the best to Rose.

_Doctor: You’ll never guess which one I am!!!! ! !!! 😂😂😂_

Of course, Rose guesses immediately. Her message comes in a few minutes later, after stop eighteen.

_Rose: you never said you could be a woman!_

The Doctor grins.

 _Doctor: Never been a woman before! It’s very exciting!! ! ! !!! 🤩🤩🤩_  
_Rose: blimey, you’re enthusiastic_  
_Doctor: It turns out I’m very excited about everything now! No more grump😠!!! ! !!! !_  
_Rose: so who’re your new friends?_  
_Doctor: Ryan, Graham, Yaz 😍 They’re just temporary though… :-( I’m trying to get them home but the TARDIS is NOT cooperating!!!!!!!!! ! ! ! !!! !!  😫😫😫_

Of course, by the time she gets Rose’s response, they’ve gotten back to Sheffield, and Yaz has invited the Doctor in for tea. She sends Rose another picture from the flat:

 _< image: IMG_475834813>_  
_Doctor: TEA AT YAZ’S!!!! ! !!!!!! ! !!  ☕🥘_  
_Rose: have fun xx_

By then, she’s already halfway cross town trying to solve a spider mystery. She suspects that’s included in Rose’s definition of fun.

* * *

 

She’s beginning to doubt her choice of timeline. It’s been years and years for her, and Rose is only three-and-a-bit years older than she was when the Doctor left her. She decides to move it up— she gives each day an hour, so a day for Rose is a little under a month, now, for the Doctor. She wants to speed it up more, but she’s afraid she’ll go too far, and she’ll be left mourning Rose before she’s ready (again).

* * *

It takes her new friends weeks to ask her who she texts. It’s when they’ve just left Kerblam!— the Doctor is sending Rose fez selfies as Graham and Yaz try to stop Ryan from popping the bubble wrap, and suddenly Yaz stops, turns, and says, “Who’re you sending those to, anyway?”

“They’re for my collection,” the Doctor says, snapping another.

“You collect selfies?” Yaz asks.

“’Course I do,” the Doctor says. “Doesn’t everyone, these days?”

“We’re in the time vortex,” Ryan, distracted from the bubble wrap, reminds her.

“Whatever,” the Doctor says. “Your days.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Ryan says. “I think the Doctor has a secret friend she won’t tell us about.”

“Oh, leave her be,” Graham says. “She’s allowed her friends.”

The Doctor rolls her eyes.

“Really, you lot,” she says. “I can text an old friend if I want to.”

The phone buzzes. Yaz lunges for it, knocking it out of the Doctor’s hand. It skitters across the floor, and the Doctor cringes. Ryan dives and grabs at it.

“Who’s Rose?” he asks, squinting at the screen. “Is this her?”

Yaz elbows him to lower the phone so she can look.

“Oh, she’s pretty,” she says. “And she thinks you’re cute.”

The Doctor snatches the phone back. Sure enough, the notification that pops up on the screen just says _cute_ — the Doctor unlocks the phone and types a response as she tries to keep the melancholy out of her tone.

“She’s just an old friend.” She glances up. “I told you I had lots of old friends, didn’t I? Lost touch with most of them.” She puts the phone in her pocket and shrugs. “Never with Rose, though.” She pulls the fez off her head. “Anyway. Where to next?”

* * *

No one comments on her phone again, even when they’re watching what is one of the most beautiful sunsets the Doctor has ever seen (which is saying something) and she takes a picture of it to send to Rose.

 _Rose: pretty_  
_Rose: prettier than mine?_  
_< image: sunset_view>_  
_Rose: to tell the truth I took that ages ago on holiday, was just waiting for the right moment_

The Doctor smiles.

 _Doctor: It’s not a competition._  
_Doctor: But if it were I’d win!! ! ! ! !!!! 🥇🥇🥇_

* * *

A few days later, which is only a few hours in Rose’s time, she gets another text.

 _Rose: I’m pregnant, by the way_  
_Rose: twins!_

The Doctor can’t quite describe the combination of emotions she feels at that.

Happy, of course. This is what Rose deserves, a family, a husband, children.

But sad, too. She misses Rose. She misses everyone, of course. But she loved Rose. She loves Rose. She gives love freely, but she doesn’t often give so deeply— she’s loved Rose like that, and River, and Clara, too, in a different sort of way. But she doesn’t let herself get attached. When she does, it’s because somebody takes her by surprise, smiles unexpectedly, comes up with clever ideas when the Doctor’s almost lost hope.

When she winds up with an attachment like that, well— she treasures it, and she does all she can not to lose it.

But she always loses it.

And now Rose is pregnant, having twins, and the Doctor is in a whole different universe, wishing she could be there to congratulate her in person. She knows having a family is unrealistic, but not even being able to congratulate a woman she loves, hug her, meet her children? She’s always known it would come to this eventually. All the same, it guts her.

_Doctor: Congratulations!!!!!!!! ! ! ! !!!!!!! !! !!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉_

* * *

A few days later, she realizes she does want to share this part of her life with the fam. The person she was mere weeks ago never would have dared, but-- she's different, now, and she wants to share more. She takes out her phone when they’re all in the kitchen one day and shows them all the back, says, “This is the Gallifreyan word for ‘rose.’”

“Did you do that yourself?” Ryan asks.

The Doctor shakes her head.

“TARDIS did,” she answers. “Lost my old phone when I regenerated. Empty pockets, remember? Good old TARDIS, though. Had everything downloaded.”

The TARDIS gurgles in the background.

“She’s brilliant,” the Doctor adds. “Rose, I mean. She’s in a parallel universe. It’s a miracle I can still talk to her.” She pauses. “I’ve got it on a delay. A day for her is a month for me. Used to be a year, but that got too slow. It’s been over a thousand years for me. Something like three and a half for Rose.”

“Whoa, mate,” Ryan says. “That’s not nothing.”

Graham’s looking at her like he understands.

“Did you love her?” he asks.

“I love everyone,” the Doctor answers. She hesitates. “But yes. She’s got another version of me, you know. In the other universe. It’s complicated. He’s human. They’re growing old together.”

“Because you can’t, right?” Yaz says.

The Doctor nods.

“Sometimes I wish—” she begins, but her voice cracks, and she has to stare up at the ceiling. The others pretend not to notice.

* * *

Sometimes she wishes she could grow old.

* * *

She thinks she’s starting to get attached to Yaz. In the deep way, the dangerous way.

She pretends not to.

She thinks Rose can tell. She tells Rose about her adventures, and she knows she mentions Yaz more often than the other two. Not to mention the constant tea at Yaz’s texts— _you never used to come for tea at mine!_ Rose complains.

* * *

After a couple of years, Graham decides his nerves can’t handle time travel anymore and asks to be dropped off in Sheffield. Ryan follows a year or so after— he’s had fun, he explains, but he thinks he might want to settle down, and he can’t very well do that if he’s gallivanting around time and space.

For Rose, it’s been a month.

* * *

And that leaves the Doctor and Yaz. The Doctor doesn’t think Yaz is ever going to give up the stars. Not until the stars give up on her.

 _She reminds me of you_ , the Doctor tells Rose, during one of their more serious moments. _Should I be worried?_  
_no_ , Rose answers. _let her have her stars._

* * *

In one universe, Rose Tyler is pregnant with twins.  
In another, the Doctor sits in the TARDIS doorway with Yasmin Khan, looking out at a supernova.  
_Doctor: Rose?_  
_Doctor: Is this what happy is?_  
_Doctor: For both of us?_  
_Rose: it might just be._

 

**Author's Note:**

> i seem to have fallen into comparative shipping of thirteen/rose and thasmin... also isn't it funny that thasmin gets a ship name but doctor/rose never does? i always wanted ten/rose to be called toes but unfortunately i was not in the fandom when those decisions were being made due to being seven at the time
> 
> follow me on tumblr at regenderate/my creative blog burclay!
> 
> also! lifeitself (who's writing the marvelous fic your bouquet of golden roses) and i are planning on doing a doctor who collaboration! and we wanted to ask if there were any ideas that you've always wanted to read and not seen yet, or any ideas you think are cool, or literally anything you want to see in a potential fic the two of us might write. so if you have ideas you can leave a comment here or on your bouquet of golden roses! or on heartbeats since that seems to be my claim to fame these days :-D


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